SaGa SCARLET GRACE: AMBITIONS™

"Hey, that's kinda like a lighthouse!" is gonna pop up in mind every time I see a lightbulb turn on for at least a month. My man Lewis Darling was killing it. I'm very new to the SaGa series and one of the reasons I started looking their way was because people said that Scarlet Grace has one of the best turn-based combat systems out there. They were right. Early on I was taking like 5+ minutes per battle encounter, not because the attack animations were long and drawn out, but because I really had to... think. A lot. I struggled quite a bit and hated that even after winning a fight, over half of my party members got KO'd and lost some LP. Then I realized that was intentional. The battle system doesn't demand that you get through each fight in the cleanest way possible, everything, even letting allies die, is all in the name of manipulating the combat timeline in your favor. Then when I got over that initial hump and everything started clicking... it's a beautiful thing, watching so many United Attacks pop off in a single round. What a joy it is to have a skill glimmer at a crucial moment and save you from a treacherous situation. How grand it is to reach the point where your main attackers are doing 80% health to normal enemeis with one move, and the encounter is STILL a fun challenge. There are some turn-based RPGs where I enjoy the overall combat more because of more robust party-building aspects (job and class-based games, whereas SSG characters only have their static stats, weapons, and roles), but mechanically... I think this is now my favorite turn-based system. I bamboozled myself in thinking this was a modest 40 hour game across all routes after glancing at HLTB. My singular playthrough with Urpina took me 60 hours. I was not at all prepared for so much game to be in my video game. Which is weird because there are no dungeons or towns to explore on foot, no cutscenes, and at least for Urpina's route, the main plot wasn't much of anything to care about. During Chapter 1 my thoughts of the game amounted to: this combat system is amazing, but... that's all this game really has as I'm just being funneled from one area where I have to take out enemies in a mine, to another area where I have to beat up a giant worm, with some dialogue in between talking about things and people I hardly know and don't care about. Then I hit Chapter 2 and the entire map opened up and the game told me to just go around and do whatever. So I did whatever, exploring parts of the map I hadn't touched yet, doing little sidequests that had different outcomes depending on my dialogue choices, hearing tales from bards giving me hints about how to find a special weapon in that part of the map, running into characters I had never seen before on the left, with Urpina's dialogue box on the right saying, "Do you wanna save the world with me?" when the main plot suggested we were kinda just settling our own affairs instead of outright trying to save the world, and I had a blast. The game's art style and world map aesthetic made me think of a board game, and Scarlet Grace did indeed play out like a big ol' board game. Very enjoyable and unconventional RPG where the only reason I don't think more highly of it is because I would've like something more substantial to attach to in terms of characters or narrative. Maybe I'll do another character's route in the future and that'll elevate this game in my mind even further, who knows.